


Boundaries

by danceswithoutwolves



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, American Revolution RPF, Historical RPF
Genre: M/M, Writing about historical figures smooching should not be this gratifying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 20:52:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5799691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/danceswithoutwolves/pseuds/danceswithoutwolves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A first kiss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Boundaries

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: extreme cheesiness ahead

Candlelight danced iridescent against the walls, the room’s occupants cast in intimate hues of gold by its warm glow. Atop the crisply folded blankets of his bed Hamilton sat with his back against the wall, his auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail tenuously held together by a thin ribbon. Pale hands gripped a small book; teeth scraped along his bottom lip as his eyes roved avariciously across paragraphs and sentences. Discarded by the bed were his boots, scuffed around the toes, and the pages of his book crinkled dryly as he turned them. Across the room Laurens had draped himself over his desk, fingers curled tightly around a pen scratching frenetically across a sheet of paper. A comfortable silence hung over the pair, a blessed moment of quietude in the midst of the swirling maelstrom of revolution, and they were both content to immerse themselves in pages of writing as the soothing warmth of the candles bled across their skin.

Perhaps an hour passed before Hamilton grew restless. Softly he dog-eared the page he was on and closed his book, set it aside. His eyes wandered over to Laurens, the broad shoulders straining the fabric of his thin nightshirt, the loose spill of his fair ponytail. Haphazardly he brushed several blonde strands behind his ear that had broken free whilst he wrote. Hamilton allowed his head to fall back against the wall, lips parted as he gazed unfocusedly at the ceiling. Warmth suffused his cheeks, and he knew better than to dismiss the development as entirely the fault of the myriad candles.

It was not as if he had never noticed the allure of his friend. In fact, it was impossible not to notice. Ladies never ceased to fawn over Laurens: the strong frame, the oh-so kissable lips, the soft, pale hair. Such features had undeniably captured Hamilton’s interest as well, but what held it were the eyes: John’s eyes were kind, a gentle blue framed by thick lashes that left Alexander with slightly less air in his lungs each time he saw them. Letting Laurens speak proved a grave mistake on Hamilton’s part, too, as from their very first conversation he found himself tumbling ever forwards into feelings he would really rather not hold. Even when he loathed the rest of the world, he could never hate Laurens, which he felt was problematic, as when he endeavored to hate the entire world, he meant not to leave any exceptions.

But as things were, he was caught in the gravity of John Laurens, irrevocably entangled, so to speak, and he was currently blushing like a verdant young lady in the throes of her first love.

A sharp exhalation startled him then, roping him back into reality, and he sat himself upright in curiosity. Pen discarded, Laurens gingerly rubbed his hand, flexing his tanned fingers cautiously. Sympathy panged in Hamilton’s chest—many a night had his hand cramped up after several arduous hours of writing. Silently he swung his sock-clad feet over the edge of the bed and padded over to Laurens, placing a hand on his chair (knuckles lightly pressed into John’s back, not unintentionally). After stiffening in surprise for a moment, Laurens relaxed against the contact. He tipped his head backwards to look up at Alexander, a small, almost apologetic, smile tugging at the corners of his lips—as if he were apologizing for drawing Hamilton’s attention. Warmer than the flickering candles peppered throughout the room, gazing upwards at him were crystalline shades of blue like a halcyon sea glistening beneath sunlight, blue like a cloudless springtime sky.

“Another essay on slavery?” Alexander arched an eyebrow. He had left the top laces of his nightshirt undone, and heat from the candle on Laurens’s desk radiated pleasantly against his bare neck and chest. John’s eyes flitted down to the exposed skin and darted away as he lowered his head back down to stare intently at his essay. Well.

“Yes. I had meant to begin this yesterday, as a matter of fact, but…” Laurens trailed off, fingers reaching automatically for the security of his pen. “I didn’t have the opportunity.”

“And so now you write until you can no longer hold a pen, naturally,” Leaning forward, Alexander laid his free hand on top of John’s, which was curled, ungainly, around said writing utensil and promptly stilled beneath the touch. In one fluid motion Hamilton plucked the pen from his friend’s hand and twirled it, unable to resist adding the flair to his movement. Across the room sat his own desk, and he sauntered over to grab the chair tucked into it, returning and setting it down beside John’s with an unceremonious thud. Affectionate toleration colored John’s expression as he watched Alexander flurry about the room, a crimson curl coming loose from his ponytail during the ordeal and tumbling, distractingly, against his forehead. One of his socks was beginning to slip down his calf, freeing itself from the breeches Hamilton had not yet bothered to exchange for something more comfortable for bed.

Pen in hand, poised to immerse himself in the writing, he sat down beside Laurens and pored over the essay. A distance less than what society might consider proper spanned between them, but Alexander had never been a paragon of decorum. John studied his friend as he lost himself in the essay: the blue-violet eyes set to glisten in the candlelight, vivid intelligence flaring behind them, locked keen and hawk-like on the prose before them. The elegant nose and cheekbones dotted with freckles, what some derisively called feminine, but John quite frankly adored Alexander’s features. The pale column of his neck, stained aureate, trailing down to a smooth chest, a lithe frame, like something carved of marble, yet bursting and sparking with intensity, passion, life–

John swallowed and turned his gaze back to his desk, shaking away such perfidious thoughts. Exhaustion must have been getting to him. Blinking, he brushed those infernal strands of hair back behind his ear and leaned forward, rested an elbow on the desk to better observe Hamilton’s revisions. This in turn proved a mistake, as Alexander had scooted closer to the essay at the same time; from hip to knee were their legs pressed together lightly. Alexander appeared to take no noticed of this, lips moving faintly as they tasted the shape and form of John’s prose, eyes narrowed critically; thus, Laurens deigned it unnecessary to take any notice either. And when Alexander asked a question to clarify his intentions with one line, John’s voice belied none of his internal, leg-related conflict. After a while, he engaged more wholly in the editing of his essay, and before he knew it he too lost himself in the words, the rhetoric. He would have been content to stay in such a state, though the universe evidently had other plans.

“Commas, John,” Hamilton muttered idly as his pen froze above one line despite the dubious necessity of said commas, and Laurens felt compelled to point this out.

“No, you see, that doesn’t require commas; it is essential to the sentence,” he tapped the appositive Hamilton readied to suffocate with punctuation.

Alexander affected an expression then—lips pursed, brows high—that John knew all too well: that face preceded a verbal evisceration of his argument, and it was endearing when he did not find himself on the receiving end. The effect was diminished slightly by the warmth sparkling in his light eyes and the fact that their knees still pressed together, faces no more than a foot apart. Nonetheless, deciding not to weather the storm of Alexander expounding upon the merits of liberal comma usage, John playfully snatched the pen from his hand and jotted down a sentence that had occurred to him a few minutes earlier. Pointedly he kept his eyes trained down, ignored the delicate lips that had failed to close after he cut off their speech, the lips that twitched up at the corners as a thought occurred to Hamilton.

Again Alexander crossed the room to his own desk, but rather than a chair, this time he grabbed a pen from its holder and sauntered back to Laurens. Placing a hand on his shoulder, he bent forwards to reach over John’s arm and add in the two disputed commas. His face rested perhaps two inches from John’s, and Alexander felt the tension in his shoulder as he sucked in an uneven breath. If John turned his head, their lips would meet.

“There,” he breathed, reveling in the shiver that ran up John’s spine, and he did not move after writing in the commas; Laurens remained trapped. An auburn twist of hair that had fallen in front of one eye blew gently with his speech, languidly, and the candle on Laurens’s desk colored everything with such intimacy, such warmth. Heat radiated up from John’s shoulder into Hamilton’s thin hand and made his chest ache with the desire to get closer, but already he pushed his boundaries.

“Alex—” John began, turning to face his friend out of polite habit, but the words halted in his throat as he felt the soft brush of his lips against Alexander’s. He drew in a stuttering breath and jerked his head away, though scant space still remained between them. The full pair of lips beside him had not budged; they evinced no reaction, no sign of agitation or acrimony, and those lips had really not been entirely unpleasant against his own, and John had always known he lacked a fancy for the fairer sex, but why did it have to be his closest friend, why did he have to want to lean forwards and—

“Yes?” Hamilton inquired innocently, and the golden-bathed violet of his irises pierced clear into John. Face tilted in expectation of an answer he waited, but John’s line of thought had utterly dissipated. Desperately he scrambled for a coherent response, but his thoughts intransigently fixed themselves upon Alexander, the long lashes fanning out in shadowy elegance, the copper constellations of freckles dusted across high cheekbones, the impossibly colored eyes. He did not allow his eyes to stray farther down to the bared neck and cunning lips he was all too aware of. Why had Alexander not moved away yet? That beautiful mixture of blue and violet melted into John, and the hand on his shoulder felt leaden; hopelessly he tried to allow it to ground him in reality. Alexander’s expression gave way to something different then, something softer and less angular, something John could not place simmering behind his eyes, which flashed quickly, inadvertently, down to his mouth and back up. Warmth flushing into his cheeks, John licked his inexplicably dry lips.

The grip on his shoulder tightened, slender fingers pressing and rubbing into his arm; John opened his mouth to say something, anything, but whatever words he may have strung together caught in his throat; everything was scintillating candlelight and delightfully torrid air; it was all auburn hair and smooth pale skin. Searching Alexander’s eyes, he could do nothing but sit frozen with the phantom feeling of his dear friend’s lips on his own, wonder what sort of thoughts wheeled behind his eyes. The fingers wandered up to his neck, leaving dazzlingly warm trails in their wake, and John felt his eyelashes flutter, his eyelids drop a fraction of an inch. Decorum shrieked for him to push away, to turn his head, to haul himself across the room and walk out the door, but his heart refused to comply. Could Alexander hear his pulse slamming though his skin, pounding insistent as a war-drum beneath his ear? Fingers gripping his pen vice-like, his eyes roved unbidden down to Alexander’s mouth, and was it just him, or were they both leaning forwards, millimeter by agonizing millimeter—

Someone knocked at the door.

A knot formed in John’s throat as his allegro-beating heart veritably jumped in his chest, and he let out a trembling exhalation; he had not realized he was holding his breath. Alexander straightened his spine and backed away, fingertips darting from John’s neck as if singed, leaving odd patches of coldness prickling at his skin in their absence. Shoulders straightened elegantly—an affected, military stance, at odds with the hotly flushed cheekbones and expressive eyes—he made an aborted gesture with his hands before padding over to the door, a cloying silence bearing down upon them. It was unlike him to remain so silent, not offering up a single remark after they had nearly—Laurens sucked in his bottom lip and bit down lightly, a nervous habit that had not been provoked in many years. His stomach flipped unpleasantly as Hamilton paused before the door, as he tugged down one sleeve of his shirt with trembling fingers. He watched as he swung the door open halfway and stepped forward to converse with an obscured figure in a low tone.

Laurens raked a hand through his hair none too gently, setting several strands to fall out of place. Agitated, he ripped the ribbon from his hair, allowing a sea of disheveled blonde to cascade down over his shoulders. Against a dry throat he swallowed, blinking hard, and ardently he stared at the candle on his desk; he followed the slow, molten trail carved by a bead of wax as gravity tugged it downwards. In the calmness, the singularity, of the languid motion he endeavored to collect his thoughts—to no avail. Flickering impressions of lovely carmine hair, the fleeting sensation of breath hot upon his lips, the sure press of fingers against the sensitive skin of his neck: these ill-defined thoughts spiraled tumultuously in his mind. At last, unwilling to sit prey to his own thoughts, he stood up, knocking his chair backwards with his knees. Drawing in a deep breath, attempting to quell the nervous twitching of his fingers, he turned around to lean back against his desk, hands gripping the wooden edge stiffly. Tightly he shut his eyes, tipping his head back as if his thoughts would succumb to gravity and tumble away.

The door creaked, soft footsteps whooshed across the floorboards towards John, and when he opened his eyes once more, Alexander stood before him.

“Who was that?” John addressed the patch of floor to the left of his friend’s sock-clad feet.

“Unimportant. I believe we had more… pressing matters to attend to.”

“We- we did?” John asked Alexander’s feet as they shuffled closer, and he cursed himself for stumbling over the words, but he could feel the air escaping from his lungs and clamorous emotions pressing down urgently, tightly upon his chest. Alexander was a friend, a beloved friend; terror should not strike his heart at the prospect of making eye contact with him, but here John was, jaw clenched tightly, eyes locked on Alexander’s feet, and that one sock slipping down his calf really was (adorably) distracting.

One pale hand reached forward to gingerly encircle his wrist; another reached upwards to tilt his chin up, and one side of Alexander’s mouth quirked upwards as the corners of his eyes crinkled in mirth. John’s heart skipped a beat as he found himself mere inches from his dear boy, golden light spilling gently, intimately over his elegant face; his lips parted as he endeavored to draw in a breath; words formed in his throat, feeble, and dissipated before they could pass through his lips. “Alexander—” he started, and swallowed, blinking helplessly down at a set of eyes edged with endearing crinkles.

“Do you know what I am thinking right now?”

“That you should fix your left sock?” He had not meant to say that aloud, and the question seemed to genuinely catch Alexander by surprise.

“Hmm?” His eyes widened, head snapping down to inspect the state of his socks, and John could see the laughter bubbling up behind his eyes as he looked back up at John, shaking his auburn head from side to side. “No, that wasn’t it.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“In that case, would you care to enlighten me?” John aimed for a casual tone, but Alexander’s hand tightened on his wrist, and his voice faltered on the last syllable.

“Of course.”

And suddenly Alexander was leaning forward, and his lips were pressing into John’s own, and they were soft and light and ever so gentle. As John allowed his eyes to flutter shut, a flurry of emotions seemed to explode within his chest, moiling and cascading, lungs constricting, thoughts scattering, yet at that moment John Laurens could not care less that his capacity for higher thought had entirely abandoned him. In that moment John Laurens could not care less about the developing situation with Alexander’s left sock or the essay left discarded on the table or even the omnipresent juggernaut of revolution; his world had narrowed down to the guttering heat of the candles and the heat of Alexander’s body pressed up against him, trapping him against the table, an all too willing captive, the slackening fingers on his wrist, the thumb dragging a slow arc down his skin, a trail of humming electricity, the set of lips pressed against and moving with his own. The lips tautened a minuscule amount—Alexander fighting off a grin, valiantly. A flood of emotion overcame John with that one little action, and he struggled to maintain his poise, but the dam of his composure broke, snapped rather like a toothpick, and a wide grin stretched out across his lips, effectively breaking the kiss. Pressing his forehead against Alexander’s, he breathed out a laugh; their noses pressed awkwardly together, and Alexander brought a hand up to tangle hard in John’s loose hair as his mouth curved around a brilliant smile, a subdued laugh slipping past his teeth.

A thousand words formed and crumbled upon John’s lips; euphoria, fear, giddiness, and something far warmer and far more frightening coursed through his veins, ran as a swift undercurrent through his intentions, but, stricken by the weight of Alexander in his arms and the phantom sensation of a mouth pressed against his own and the hand knotted possessively in his hair, all he could do was keep his eyes closed and revel in the moment. Shades of gold and red flickered against the blackness of his eyelids as the flames of the candles waved languidly in the quiet room. All too soon, Alexander leaned back and broke the silence; the air around them was warm, yet John’s forehead felt cold with the loss of the contact.

“Well, Colonel Laurens.” Breath ghosted hot across John’s lips, and his eyes flew open to take in Alexander’s wide eyes still far closer than he had expected—he could only look at one eye at a time. Alexander suddenly became two inches shorter, and John had to stifle another laugh as he realized his dear boy had been standing on his tip toes to kiss him; nevertheless, his mouth softened into an endeared smile as Alexander’s curved wickedly upwards on one side. “I suppose I ought to confess now the partiality I have found myself afflicted with—the fault lying entirely with yourself, of course.”

“I do beg your pardon.” John’s words were, “pardon”, yet his eyes screamed, “I am unapologetic and would love nothing more than to have your mouth on mine again”. Emboldened by Alexander’s hand now resting lightly against the back of his neck, he brought a hand up to carefully cup Alexander’s cheek, thumb brushing feather-soft across a freckled cheekbone; his heartbeat stuttered as his eyes skimmed over the delicate shadows caressing his lovely face. “I hope I may find a way to merit this partiality, always.”

All traces of teasing fled from Alexander’s face, his forehead crinkling and lips parting in earnest; the fingers on John’s neck dug ever so slightly harder into his skin as Alexander leaned forwards to press a soft, lingering kiss against the corner of John’s mouth.

“My dear, all you must do is keep breathing.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Casually tries to work in references to Ham & Laurens's letters; not so casually gets really emotional about lams. I'm hamiltonesque on tumblr if anyone ever wants to yell about the American Revolution~


End file.
